An enterprise network is a large customer network including a vast array of networking equipment (often geographically dispersed) requiring the ability to communicate and share information. An enterprise customer (such as Intel, IBM, and the like) typically subscribes to specific service plans such that each time a user comes online in the enterprise network, the user is provisioned to have access to services in the service plans to which the enterprise customer subscribes. The services provided in the service plans may include four-digit dialing, five-digit dialing, star-nine dialing (i.e. dialing “9” for international), call waiting, call forwarding, teleconferencing capabilities, voicemail, and a wide variety of other services and dialing plans offered by most service providers.
Since enterprise customers typically have different telecommunication services and application needs, the services and dialing plans subscribed to by an enterprise customer are typically particular to that enterprise customer, and tend to vary across enterprise customers. However, although enterprise customers use various combinations of dialing plans, many of the dialing plans used across enterprise customers tend to be the same. As such, a service provider supporting a plurality of enterprise customers typically hosts a large embedded base of public and private dialing plans.
A service provider typically packages particular services, dialing plans, and other features into service offerings that span a wide variety of services that may be required by an enterprise customer (such as time division multiplexing (TDM) services, Internet Protocol (IP) services, international services, and the like). As such, specific dialing plans are often embedded within a particular service offering in order to enable the enterprise customer users to use the services provided in the particular service offering. In general, a dialing plan provides specialized routing associated with specialized services to which an enterprise customer subscribes.
Unfortunately, the embedding of specific dialing plans within service offerings requires that an enterprise customer subscribe to a full service offering in order to obtain one particular dialing plan. For example, if a US-based enterprise customer requires a four-digit dialing plan, but the service provider has included the four-digit dialing plan within an international service offering, the US-based enterprise customer must subscribe to the entire international service offering in order to utilize the four-digit-dialing dialing plan. As a result, network endpoints are often unable to utilize particular dialing plans.
As such, a need exists in the art for a method for providing ubiquitous access to dialing plans for any network endpoint in an enterprise customer network.